


Unbroken

by 221b_hound



Series: Unkissed [40]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Bubble Bath, Coming In Pants, Dancing, Hand Feeding, Happy Sex, Love, M/M, Music, Outdoor Sex, Public Hand Jobs, Sally's mysterious boyfriend, Sherlock Holmes on the Asexuality Spectrum
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-09
Updated: 2015-07-09
Packaged: 2018-04-08 10:39:08
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,075
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4301577
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/221b_hound/pseuds/221b_hound
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>While at a pub to see Harry's new favourite band, Clara talks to Sherlock about the changes in Harry, and Sherlock reflects on the changes in himself. Recent months have been full of challenge, distress and sorrow - but also healing, self-discovery and joy, for both him and John. On the walk home through Regent's Park afterwards, Sherlock decides to demonstrate how very much he loves his husband.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Unbroken

**Author's Note:**

> The last story arc reaches its conclusion - but there will be more! Oh yes, indeed!
> 
> There is some [Unkissed stuff ](http://www.redbubble.com/people/narrelleharris/collections/362000-unkissed) over here.
> 
> And stuff about the Holmes/Watson book I'm writing, [The Adventure of the Colonial Boy, over here. ](https://www.facebook.com/pages/Improbable-Press/722133377904170)

“I really think she’s going to make it this time.”

Sherlock, standing with his back to the wall at the very rear of the pub, as though fearful of getting an ice-pick between the shoulder blades from one of the gyrating couples on the dance floor, saw Clara’s lips move and read the sentence. The music from the stage was much too loud for him to hear much otherwise.

Clara grinned at him, then shifted her gaze to Harry and John at the bar. “I think she could, you know. Because she’s not doing it for me this time. She’s doing it for herself.”

Sherlock’s silence continued – Clara wasn’t really expecting a response, and he had no intention of shouting one back even if he’d had something to say to her. He had an opinion, of course, having more in common with Harry than he liked to admit to anyone.

For example, he had never been able to quit his drug of choice for anyone else, either. He had done it for himself; it was that or die. Anything but let himself be assaulted again by the likes of that bastard, Eastmund.

“She used to be so angry all the time,” Clara continued, either unbothered or simply not noticing Sherlock’s lack of contribution to the discussion, perhaps blaming it on the band. “She didn’t like herself very much, I think.”

Sherlock understood that too. He remembered when he didn’t like himself, because he couldn’t make himself what everyone thought he ought to be and nobody wanted what he was. He’d got clean after discovering there were worse things than having to live in his own head, but it was a daily choice. A daily struggle not to make himself numb again (and he could never be numb enough, after Eastmund). He developed a strident persona, and ran with it. He made himself a person he could live with, at least, even if it wasn’t exactly who he was at heart.

All the love in the world can’t save you if you don’t want to be saved, or worse, don’t know _how_ to be saved.

But John came into his life, and suddenly it wasn’t such a struggle to stay clean any more. John didn’t want him to hide, or to change himself (his _timing_ , sometimes, but not the fundamental _Sherlockness_ ). John _liked_ him.

Through John, before and after Manchester, Sherlock learned not only how tolike himself, but how to _be_ himself. Finally, he had a role model for how that was done.

“And now… finally, she does,” Clara concluded, “She likes who she is without the drink.” Clara smiled. “So do I.”

Unspoken were the words _because with the drink in her, she’s awful_.

Sherlock understood that, too.

The siblings at the bar appeared to be squabbling good-naturedly. Harry was fetching lemonade for herself and Clara, while John refreshed the beer jug for him and Sherlock. Then they were laughing about something. John’s smile was like a sun.

Clara looked at Harry with shining eyes full of pride.

 _Harry has become the hero to Clara that she wanted to be,_ Sherlock observed _._

Harry had that seed in her now – the seed of belief that she was okay; that she didn’t have to compete with John or be afraid that she would be like Sacker. She could just learn to be her own true self, and that this was enough.

John and Harry finally made their way back to their partners. Harry served up the lemonade. She pulled a face at the taste of it, but then Clara kissed her, and Harry kissed back with her arms wrapped around her girl. The band finally stopped playing and some recorded music, still very loud, came over the speakers.

“Here you go, Sherlock.” John topped up Sherlock’s glass from the jug of beer. “The band Harry’s raving about is up next. We’ll catch the set if that’s okay, then we can go home.”

“It’s fine.” Sherlock sipped his beer.

“You don’t have to stay if you don’t want to, though.”

“Of course not.” Sherlock sucked the beer foam from his top lip and met John’s eyes. “But I want to.”

John was rightly sceptical. “You’re hating every second of this, aren’t you, buzz?” There was understanding rather than teasing in his tone. John had started to dance, shimmying his body close to Sherlock’s, one arm around his waist, not raunchy so much as simply enjoying their proximity.

Sherlock put his beer down, put his hands on John’s hips and began to dance with him, their bodies moving in sympathy.

“Not _every_ second.”

There was that sunshine smile again, and Sherlock found he would tolerate all these people and the smell of stale beer, stale smoke, stale sweat, for a little while at least, if it meant he could dance with John as he smiled like that.

“Hang on, isn’t that Greg?”

Sherlock danced John around so that he could see, and yes indeed, there was Greg Lestrade and Molly Hooper, hanging onto each other’s waists and dancing. Greg kissed Molly’s brow and raised a beer glass in cheers to someone across the room.

Dear God. _Sally Donovan._

Donovan waved at her boss and his girlfriend, then waved past them – at Harry and Clara – and then she froze, clearly thrown by Sherlock and John’s presence.

“Didn’t I tell you?” Harry grinned at them, “This is Sally’s boyfriend’s band on next.”

Sherlock and John both looked to the stage and saw a tall man, long corkscrew black hair falling over his well-muscled shoulders, shown to advantage in a figure-hugging T-shirt that depicted a T-rex using a selfie stick to take a photo. Even plugging in his guitar and sound-checking, the man was graceful and handsome. He smiled and laughed with his bandmates, from time to time throwing an intense look – comprised of equal parts devotion, amazement and bright-burning pride – to Donovan down at the front, his brown eyes dancing with delight and fondness every time he looked at her.

In fact, he was very much as Sherlock deduced he would be, except for being a musician rather than a barman. Sherlock had known Sally’s Mysterious Boyfriend was in the pub a lot, because Sally was at pubs a lot lately. That she was humming all the time Sherlock had put down to sheer contentment with her love life. He hadn’t recognised the tunes, because he almost never did, except for the ones John sang to him. He hadn’t realised they were songs from the boyfriend’s band (recognisable now from the sound check).

There was always something.

Sally blinked at him and John, then waved, a little uncertainly. John waved back more emphatically and Sally relaxed. She turned back to the stage, catching that sappy look from the boyfriend, and treated him to a dazzling smile.

It occurred to Sherlock that Sally, too, was peeling back the layers of expectation and the attempt to audit herself to meet other people’s standards. _She will be her own self instead of trying to be, or to deny, or to defy, those other expectations and burdens._

The band swung into action, and Sally’s Mysterious Boyfriend introduced himself as Chris Alleyne. He was the lead guitarist, and lead singer and, judging by the way Sally looked at him, made of valour and awesome. Not unlike the way he had looked at her, and indeed continued to look at her, whenever their eyes met during the set. The two of them had an utter delight in each other that Sherlock recognised.

He turned that very same look on his husband, who had begun to dance again. John’s shining eyes met Sherlock’s, setting alight that sunshine grin again. Sherlock could not help a smiling response that crinkled the corners of his eyes and made his mouth dimpled and crooked in the purest happiness. He kissed John to hide the rawness of it from others, though Harry and Clara were too busy kissing and dancing themselves to have noticed.

Both couples – Harry and Clara, John and Sherlock – moved towards the throng on the dance floor. Harry and Clara moved sensuously together, laughed together as they danced, interrupting themselves to sing choruses loudly and with exaggerated expressions.

John and Sherlock were sensuous too, but as they danced their motion was not so much sexually charged as a poem in complementary synchronicity. They did not rub against each other in substitute coitus, like so many on the floor, though they were close together. Each with a hand on the other’s waist or hip, the tiny span of air between them was warm and charged with energy. Their movements flowed so that they echoed and reflected each other. When they touched, it was a simple light brush or soft pressure, transmitting affection, and even tenderness.

When the next song proved to be slower, filled with fervent adoration, Sherlock wrapped his arms around John and held him close as they swayed, and John wound his arms around Sherlock and rested his cheek on Sherlock’s shoulder.

Sherlock could see Molly and Greg dancing in much the same way, and Harry and Clara too. Sally Donovan looked at Chris with the softest, happiest expression Sherlock had ever seen on her face, as Chris, with that expression’s partner, sang the lyric to her.

 _You don’t need me, but I hope that you want me_  
_Let me give your strength a place to rest_  
_You don’t owe me, but I hope that you love me_  
_For loving you is now the thing that I want to do best_

Sherlock couldn’t help pressing his nose against John’s temple then, to breathe in and out against that warm skin and John’s scent. He found most love songs puerile, but there was something in this one that found echoes in him.

John apparently felt the same, judging by how Sherlock felt John’s face move as he smiled, his face tucked in close under Sherlock’s jaw.

 _So much happiness here_ , Sherlock thought wonderingly, looking at these people he knew, looking at the way they looked at each other as they danced. _Life will always be more complicated than this, but on rare occasion it really can be as simple as this too. To love someone. To know you are loved in return. To show that love to each other._

The set finished and the piped music filled the pub again as Chris Alleyne’s band – Half Moon Cat – cleared the stage for the last band of the night.

John squeezed Sherlock’s hand. “Home, yeah?”

Sherlock nodded. John turned to farewell his sister and Clara, and waved at Greg and Molly, too, signalling greeting and goodbye in one. They waved back before Molly resumed her place under Greg’s arm and Greg murmured in her ear. Whatever he was saying, Molly was blushing madly and leaning closer against him, as his arm tightened around her.

“Whatever you deduced, I don’t want to know.”

Sherlock raised an eyebrow at Sally Donovan.

“Don’t give me that look.”

“There’s nothing to deduce,” said Sherlock, and then he frowned. “Well, not in the way that you’re thinking.”

“No?”

“No.”

“No wife or other lovers? No drug habit? No secrets?”

“Everyone has secrets,” Sherlock said, though it was true that John knew all of his by now, “His are largely around the fact he has two cats he doesn’t want his landlord to know about.”

Sally’s laugh was half irritated, half relieved. “We hid them at my place, last inspection.”

“Well then.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it.” Well, there was also the obvious but harmless Twiglets addiction, which Chris kept hidden from Donovan because she disliked the taste of Marmite so intensely, but Sherlock didn’t want to betray _all_ of the man’s vices.

“You’re not… keeping anything from me to spare my feelings?”

Sherlock arched a sardonic eyebrow at her, and she grimaced. And then she smiled. “All right, then.”

Then she was off, joining Chris who was talking to Harry, Clara, Greg and Molly.

John’s farewells said – and Sherlock’s brief nod of acknowledgement to them all – the two of them set off on the short walk home.

They cut through Regent’s Park, as they so often did, strolling hand in hand. John spoke warmly of how well Harry was doing, about how cute Molly and Greg were together, about Sally Donovan’s boyfriend being a pretty good singer. Sherlock hmmed agreement, and eventually John, smiling his contentment, walked in companionable silence with him through the park.

 _He is at peace,_ Sherlock thought. _Everything we have been through, all that suffering, and here we are. In a stronger place, individually and together. He makes me stronger. I make him stronger too._

_How is it possible that I love John Watson more now than I did when we married? Yet I do. I love him. I love him. I love him. And he loves me. Perhaps it is the thing we do best: to love each other as we do._

At the darkest patch near York Bridge, between the tennis centre and the tail end of the boating lake, crowded all in with flowering cherry trees, Sherlock tugged John off the path and into the shadows.

Before John could ask the purpose of the detour, Sherlock had turned to gather John up in a kiss. To simultaneously pull him close and press him back into the trunk of one of the towering plants.

John laughed softly, and called him sweetpea and dumpling and honeybee and buzz, when he could catch a breath, until Sherlock cupped his hand over the front of John’s jeans and gently squeezed the burgeoning bulge there.

John gasped and went still and acquiescent. “God. Sweetheart. That’s nice.”

Sherlock kissed John’s face and throat and fondled his husband. He ran his hand firmly down the bulge, letting the ends of his fingers slip underneath, between John’s legs, then back. John, stifling a moan, pressed himself backwards into the bark to steady himself.

“John,” murmured Sherlock against John’s lips, and then he kissed John’s jaw in a line to his ear. “I want to make you come,” he said, “Here in the park.”

“Christ…”

“In your clothes. Like this.” He stroked John’s trapped cock, which swelled.

John shivered and tried not to thrust. “Fuck. God. Baby.”

“You like this,” Sherlock told him, “Being fully clothed still. The physical restraint imposed on you.”

“Yes,” John agreed breathlessly, “Fuck, sweetpea, that feels good.”

“Would you like to come like this?”

“In my pants?”

“Yes. Would you like me to fondle and rub you? Bring you to orgasm, like this, out here. We might be discovered. We’re not so far from the path.”

The shiver that ran through John’s body, the jerk of his hips to press his clothed erection against Sherlock’s hand, told him _yes yes yes._

“You like it. The risk. The restraint.”

“I do.”

“Here. Hold on to me.”

John slung one arm around Sherlock’s waist, the other around his neck, and tilted his face up to kiss and be kissed.

Sherlock kneaded John’s thickened cock through his jeans, pressing the heavy fabric and the zipper over John’s shaft. Sherlock cupped his hand and fingers to massage John’s whole length and kept pressing and rubbing, while kissing John. John clung to him, moaning and whimpering into Sherlock’s mouth and into his skin, while Sherlock’s clever hand massaged and stroked John’s shaft and crown through the heavy fabric, feeling it grow thicker, hotter, harder. Sherlock stood closer still, letting his coat fall around them both.

“Move, John,” Sherlock murmured. John’s hips began to hitch, to push his cock into Sherlock’s warm, firm hand.

“Good, good, John, yes… that’s it. I want you to come for me. I want to give you everything you need. I want to hold you and give you pleasure. I love you. I love you and I want to show you how much. I want this. I want you like this…”

“Sweetheart. Oh, sweetpea. Baby. Buzz, little bug. Please. My firefly, oh oh, god, sweetheart. My precious boy. Yes.”

“Yes, John. Yes. Come for me. Come for me. Please. ”

John clutched tight and burrowed his face into Sherlock’s throat to smother the gruff moan as he came, pushing against Sherlock’s hand, inside the cotton of his clothes.

Spent, John sagged against Sherlock’s chest. Sherlock happily wrapped his arms around his love to hold him upright as John first sighed contentment, then began to giggle.

“I’m a mess.”

“Hmm,” agreed Sherlock, with a very smug grin. He nuzzled his nose behind John’s ear and kissed the tip of it. “You are. I made a mess of you.”

“Pleased with yourself, are you?”

“Very.”

John kissed him. “Me too,” he confessed. “Let’s get home, honeybee. We can have a bath, hmm?”

“Hmmm,” agreed Sherlock.

They held hands for the remainder of the walk home, Sherlock stealing glimpses at John’s expression. _Uncomfortable. Sticky. But he is smiling. Every step, even as his ejaculate goes cold and makes it chafe, he nevertheless is pleased with the memory of what we’ve just done. In part he is embarrassed that he’s not **more** embarrassed._

Sherlock leaned over to kiss John’s temple. “I know a place in Hampstead Heath which would be excellent to do this again, sometime.”

John giggled cheerfully and his somewhat inelegant gait grew more jaunty as they walked the last stretch to Baker Street.

At home, John stripped and tossed his messed-up clothes into the hamper, sluiced himself down in a quick, warm shower, then ran a bubble bath. Sherlock joined him with a half-jar of Waitrose’s Seriously Buttery Caramel Dipping Sauce. They climbed into the tub together, John behind, Sherlock in front, and took turns feeding each other caramel sauce from their fingers.

“I don’t know how life could get more perfect,” sighed John happily, watching Sherlock lip a drip of sauce from John’s chest.

After the preceding months of challenges, of anxiety and nightmares and now, at last, resolution and peace, Sherlock couldn’t imagine how, either. But life was a process of change, so he assumed that whatever the future held, whatever further challenges it offered, it would also offer new ways in which he and John would be content, fulfilled and happy together.

“It’ll be fun finding out,” said John, with his sunshine smile, resting his cheek on Sherlock’s dark curls just as Sherlock rested his cheek on John’s chest, to listen to his heart beat.

**Author's Note:**

> The tree question was answered they are cherry trees. Thank you Hamstermoon!


End file.
